Report 2013-103 Recommendation 25 Responses

Report 2013-103: Armed Persons With Mental Illness: Insufficient Outreach From the Department of Justice and Poor Reporting From Superior Courts Limit the Identification of Armed Persons With Mental Illness (Release Date: October 2013)

Recommendation #25 To: Justice, Department of

To ensure that potential armed prohibited person cases do not wait too long for their first review by the APPS unit, by December 31, 2013, Justice should revise its goal for the daily queue to a more challenging level of no more than a maximum of 400 to 600 cases. Justice should monitor its performance against this goal and manage staff priorities as needed to meet it.

1-Year Agency Response

The Department will continue to monitor workload and adjust APPS processing goals as necessary. Absent unforeseen workload increases in APPS resulting from high profile public safety incidents, pending firearms law changes, or other matters beyond our control, the Department's goal is to have no more than 600 cases in the daily queue at any one time. At a minimum, the APPS Section Manager checks the queue twice a day to ensure the Department's goal is maintained. Since July 2014, APPS staff has maintained 600 or less cases in the queue.

6-Month Agency Response

The Department will continue to monitor workload and adjust APPS processing goals as necessary. Absent unforeseen workload increases in APPS resulting from high profile public safety incidents, pending firearms law changes, or other matters beyond our control, the Departments goal will be to have no more than 600 cases in the queue at any one time. Although staff have been made aware of the goal, full implementation of this finding requires additional staffing resources. Once the additional staff is hired, metrics will be monitored to ensure the goal is met. Please note that at the present time, existing staff are committed to working the APPS historical backlog, along with working the daily queue.

60-Day Agency Response

DOJ will continue to monitor workload and adjust APPS processing goals as necessary. Absent unforeseen workload increases in APPS resulting from high profile public safety incidents, pending firearms law changes, or other matters beyond our control, the Department's goal will be to have no more than 600 cases in the queue at any one time.

Although the department states here that it has revised its goal for the daily queue to have no more than 600 cases in the queue at any one time, we did not see that this goal had been communicated to staff in the APPS unit or that the department was measuring itself against that goal to determine if it needs to adjust staffing levels.